"I could believe nothing else. No one but he had been in my rooms."
"Oh! I see. And you questioned him?"
"Yes. On reaching the hall I met one of the maids ascending the stairway. I called to her, asking if she had seen Noël. She had not. She had been in the servants' hall—talking with the chauffeur—Noël had not been there."
"What did you do then?"
"I rushed to his room, which is on the floor above, thinking that, if he had taken the box, and proposed to deny the fact, he would have gone there to secrete it."
"Would he not have been more likely to leave the house immediately since he knew you would discover your loss at once?"
"No. He would realize that to flee would be to admit his guilt. He could not have gone more than a few hundred feet. Capture would have been inevitable."
"Did you find the man in the room?"
"He was just leaving it as I came up."
"What did you do then?"